The trick is to be willing to work for 120k or less, haha

Which, to be fair, is still almost twice the median household income in the USA

Also the trick is, if they want you to live anywhere with a median home price > $360k, then it's a bad deal. A $120K job better be full time remote and have fantastic work life balance.

How did you arrive at this? 3x salary as the norm?

1/3 is generally considered to be a healthy debt burden ratio.

According to whom? This would basically mean like 5% of Americans could own a house

In that case I'm in need of a significant salary increase... Over here, in a high priced region of Germany, house prices tend to be some at 10x of yearly salaries, which is totally fine.

Borrowing with 0% equity is also often considered a bad idea. If you assume 25% initial equity, you can go 1:4 salary:cheapest available housing.

If you intend to buy a family home, chances are there are two people sharing the burden. If you make $120k and the partner $60, you could borrow $540k, for a total home price of $720k if you have 25% starting equity.

That opens up quite a lot of options.

Personally, though, in the current market, I wouldn't borrow that much. It's quite possible that the biggest housing crash in several generations is just around the corner, and interest rates may very well be 15% within 5 years.

Especially if China invades Taiwan.

Man, it feels like interest rates SHOULD get to 15% in the next year, but I don't think Powell has the guts to grind the stock and real estate markets into dust the way he's supposed to

For now, he seems committed to raising rates until inflation normalizes. I don't think he's very worried about stock and real estate markets. But at some point, there will be effects in the real economy, and unemployment will start to rise.

Hopefully, inflation will go down at around 5% unemployment. But if he has to continue tightening until unemployment hits 6, 8 or 10%, I suspect he will will be forced to eventuall pivot, even if he doesn't want to.

Governments. Oh how I love government work.

As a consultant, earn 2x as much and work on legacy systems that offer a lifetime of work.

It really is quite wonderful

Tell me your ways. I wouldn’t mind working in government. Bonus that I’m a veteran (states) but now I’m 40 and still new to software ( 3 years experience self taught )

Only issue would be remote work!

Governments are serviced by a long chain of middle man businesses, and at the end of the chain is usually a group of highly paid developers with high job security maintaining legacy applications.

It isn't fun, but it is lucrative